Speech recognition systems provide facilities for recognizing components of speech in audio input. When a speaker speaks into an audio input device, the speech recognition systems process the audio input to recognize speech components. One difficulty encountered with such speech recognition systems is the difficulty in informing the user of how the audio input was interpreted and whether the audio input was properly received and processed. Certain conventional speech recognition systems have attempted to address this problem by providing a user interface, such as a speech recognition window that provides feedback to the user about the progress and results of speech recognition. Unfortunately, such windows often obscure substantial portions of the available display space on the video display. In addition, such windows are typically displayed as long as the speech recognition system is running so that the windows continue to obscure portions of the video display while the speech recognition system is running.